the rules which he gives to his monks, to guide them in the work of
transcription, show that he belonged to the Conservative school of
critics, and was anxious to guard against hasty emendations of the
text, however plausible. Practically, however, his MSS. of the Latin
Scriptures, showing the Itala and the Vulgate in parallel columns,
seem to have been answerable for some of that confusion between the
two versions which to some extent spoiled the text of Jerome, without
preserving to us in its purity the interesting translation of the
earlier Church.

[Footnote 83: 'In Psalterio et Prophetis et Epistolis apostolorum
studium maximum laboris impendi.... Quos ego cunctos novem codices
auctoritatis divinae (ut senex potui) sub collatione priscorum codicum
amicis ante me legentibus, sedula lectione transivi' (De Inst.
Praefatio). We should have expected 'tres' rather than 'novem,' as the
Psalter, the Prophets, and the Epistles each formed one codex.]

Besides his labours as a transcriber, Cassiodorus, both as an original
author and a compiler, used his pen for the instruction of his
fellow-inmates at Vivarium.

[Sidenote: Commentary on the Psalms.]

(1) He began and slowly completed a Commentary on the Psalms. This
very diffuse performance (which occupies more than five hundred
closely printed pages in Migne's edition) displays, in the opinion of
those who have carefully studied it[84], a large amount of
acquaintance with the writings of the Fathers, and was probably looked
upon as a marvel of the human intellect by the Vivarian monks, for
whose benefit it was composed, and to whom it revealed, in the Psalms